Toshiba MK6022GAX 5400/16mb cache Notebook Drive

This article is a continuation of our effort to identify quiet notebook drives, a process begun with the March 2004 article Is the Silent PC Future 2.5-inches wide? In that article, three notebook drives were assessed for noise, along with two 3.5" reference standards for SPCR.

The drive being examined today is the MK6022GAX, about the highest performance 2.5" drive in Toshiba's lineup. From Toshiba America's web site:

The MK6022GAX offers the industries highest areal density per platter, at 49.8 gigabits per square inch. The drive's 5400 RPM motor speed, improves system-level performance by as much as 12 percent when compared to 4200 RPM drives.

This new drive offers enough capacity for portable video recording and editing, with lower power consumption compared to the traditional 3.5-inch HDDs. This functionality provides ideal storage for a range of commercial and consumer notebooks, as well as non-PC applications such as PDAs, printers, copiers, GPS systems and MP3 players. The MK6022GAX is ATA-5 compliant, supporting high transfer rates of up to 100 megabytes per second.

Sorry for the generic image; my camera's CF card memory somehow got corrupted...
They all look pretty much the same anyway. Like this:

* Power consumption during seek. Max power is at turn on, and about double this, but lasts only a few seconds.

** This Toshiba MK6022GAX drive was made available courtesy of FrontierPC, a SPCR sponsor and Vancouver retailer with an online shop. They deserve much thanks for kindly providing loaners of all the notebook hard drives reviewed by SPCR thus far. Certainly if you are a Canadian or a Vancouverite, I recommend you pay FrontierPC a visit. They have recently moved to larger premises just a few doors from their old West Broadway location.

Several obvious things but still worthy of note:

The Toshiba MK6022GAX is only the second 5400 RPM notebook drive to be examined;